Red Alert

Terry Gil­liam’s sci- fi movie clas­sic is swing­ing its way to the small screen

12 Mon­keys swings on to TV, Noah Wyle brings a new crew to The Li­brar­i­ans, and much more.

How do you adapt Terry Gil­liam’s trippy, time- hop­ping film 12 Mon­keys into a tele­vi­sion se­ries? Ac­cord­ing to ex­ec­u­tive pro­ducer Natalie Chaidez ( He­roes), the woman who’s been tasked with showrun­ning Syfy’s 13- episode adap­ta­tion of the near 20- year- old dystopian clas­sic, you don’t.

“It’s re­ally a reimag­in­ing,” Chaidez clar­i­fies. “Terry Mata­las and Travis Fick­ett ( Terra Nova) wrote the pi­lot not as a 12 Mon­keys adap­ta­tion. It was retro- fit­ted into that [ world]. We very quickly dove into our own world after the pi­lot.”

If you haven’t seen Gil­liam’s film, or the de­tails are a bit hazy, the story re­volves around a virus – sup­pos­edly re­leased by ter­ror­ist group The Army of the Twelve Mon­keys – which wipes out the majority of the world’s pop­u­la­tion in the mid-’ 90s. In 2035, James Cole ( mem­o­rably played by Bruce Wil­lis on the big screen) is a con­vict who agrees to be part of a sci­en­tific time travel scheme in or­der to try and pre­vent the virus’s re­lease in the past to save the fu­ture.